Disqus - Latest Comments for Michael Kimsal

Re: Giving Incentives Away With The House

Michael Kimsal — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 14:20:43 -0000

We just sold a house and left the wall-mounted 42" plasma with it. It was a bit of a deal sweetener, but it was also much less of a hassle. Unmount it, pack it, move across states and hope it doesn't break, repatch the drywall, repaint the wall, etc. It also wasn't a top of the line model either, so it's not like it was a $3000 TV (I think it was $1600 IIRC). Probably would have fetched $1000 on ebay (maybe). Take out a couple hundred for the trouble of unmounting it, etc., and I viewed it as not that much of a financial incentive to take it vs. the difference it made when showing the house.

Re: “Social Media Consultant” Backlash

Michael Kimsal — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:41:14 -0000

@Andy - not so sure it's "easy to figure out", especially in "2 minutes". I'm looking at your site, and it would take me more than a few minutes just to check you out to see if you're the "real deal". But then, if I'm new to this, I don't know what the "real deal" is. Circular problem, compounded by nebulous definitions and no agreed upon notion of what "results" are. Is it immediate sales? Long term image/brand building in the "community"?

It was said before up above someplace - 'social media' feels like seo from 10 years ago (maybe even 5 years ago). Would you entrust your money for "social media consulting" with someone who doesn't have a blog or twitter account? Probably not. Everyone out there is having to build up themselves as examples of their own handiwork, hence a big emphasis on "how many readers/followers do you have?". And the easiest way to get those big numbers is to talk about "how to get readers/followers". I feel shades of MLM sometimes when I think about "social media" as a business and where it has the danger of going.

The world can't handle everyone being a Scoble. I mean that in the sense of number of followers and followees - we just don't have that much collective attention and time to divvy up amongst each other. And we don't all have original or useful stuff to share which wouldn't be stuff that's already been said.

Social Media is basically the new SEO, and people will focus on the easily measured stuff - followers/readers - until the technology changes and measurement tools change. SEO was all about "keywords" for years until it became apparent that the relationships between pages/domain carried as much weight (or more) as the raw content itself. When will we see the race shifting from "most followers/readers" to something else?

Re: “Social Media Consultant” Backlash

Michael Kimsal — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 09:06:13 -0000

@dannybrown:

"Just because you told a client how to set up a Twitter account and how to converse with their audience - that suddenly makes you an expert? Hell, you could get that advice from Ezine Articles, probably. I always feel that experts and gurus become so through earning it and recommendation."

But, to some clients, showing them the basics really does make you an expert. And they will rave and rave about you and recommend you to their friends/colleagues/associates. You've "earned" as much there as you might have doing harder work for someone else. You can easily build up a "guru" reputation amongst people that don't know much on a particular topic. "Peer acceptance" as a "guru" is a different thing, but your peers don't pay your invoices - your clients do.

Re: February Triangle Social Media Club: Social Media and Enterprise 2.0

Michael Kimsal — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:16:34 -0000

Planning on attending.

Re: Regardless of CPMs, VideoEgg Keeps Innovating

Michael Kimsal — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:14:52 -0000

Some of these seem 'innovative' in the classic sense (RSS, for example), and some just seem obvious to me (an industry outsider). Why hasn't anyone allowed multi-clip before? Or maybe they have and I've missed it.

Whether videoegg is around in a few years or not, I dunno. But it is nice to see companies trying new ideas, Good luck to them!

Re: Sold Out! What’s Next?

Michael Kimsal — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:13:34 -0000

Would like to attend if possible. I thought I was going to be out of town, so didn't sign up before, but I had my dates wrong. :/

Re: 2008/07/22/3-ways-to-make-more-money-blogging/

Michael Kimsal — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:42:04 -0000

I'm guilty of throwing generic ads on some sites, even knowing it doesn't work very well. I just put a few on a couple sites, and will likely remove them in a couple weeks if there's not decent activity. Also likely is I'll add a 'donate' button and simply rely on some type of goodwill from readers.

The problem, as I see it from both sides, is that ads aren't relevant. Yes, even Google's 'targetted' adsense, is rarely that relevant to *me*. They might be relevant to the content of the page, but not really to me. The content I'm reading may or may not be relevant to me. Given all the tracking Google does, I'm suprised they can't take my habits in to account more than they apparently are.

I've come to Mashable for the past several weeks and seen a 'userplane' ad. I've not yet clicked it. 'Branding' aside, how many more times do I need to register a view as a visitor and *not* click the userplane ads before my non-interest is taken in to account and a different ad is shown? What? I can't do that? That's part of the problem.

Another problem is the same damn ads all over the place. Even if something's relevant to me, I may have clicked it 2 weeks ago on another site. It's not really fair to the advertisers for me to click and visit their site multiple times. Certainly not fair on me to have to buy the same thing multiple times just to 'show support' to every site I like.

While not 'broken', the model is seriously flawed for the types of things we (bloggers) want it to do (provide us money). Invidual donations are a bit of a pain to do, both to remember to do on each site that you read, and also to manage for bloggers. Receiving money's easy, but going beyond that (identifying paid readers, sending a thanks, etc.) is harder.

Perhaps an aggregating service that helps people to make donations to groups of bloggers would be useful? Maybe that's my next project! :)

Re: 2008/07/23/google-buys-digg-what-happens-next/

Michael Kimsal — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:11:21 -0000

There was some article on TC that showed Google was experimenting with 'digg-like' rating on their search results. There was a screenshot or mockup of the results page, and this was fairly recent. I'd think the obvious reason why Google would want to buy Digg is to get the 'right' to use that style of interface, copied as closely as they want, without fear of getting sued. Yes, Google has enormous resources, but the Digg model is pretty high profile. For Google to blatantly rip off a site so popular would be wrong. Easier to buy them and avoid the headache and ill will.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/14/google-buc...

That's 1 week ago, and now there are rumors of Google buying Digg. Coincidence?

Re: 2008/07/24/music-tax-cocaine/

Michael Kimsal — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:47:04 -0000

Allen Stern had it wrong the other day - don't click on ads, just get governments to impose a fee to then redistribute to bloggers. There's load of copyrighted blog content that's shared, I dare say some of it illegally, by millions of people every day. I bet some RIAA employees even redistribute blog content illegally, with company computers no less!

The gov't should collect $50/year - only $5/month from each ISP per user - and set up a blogger fund. Bloggers would get paid from this proportionally to the amount of content they create (not how much is 'stolen', just created).

Whaddya all think?

Re: 2008/09/23/g1-iphone-prepaid/

Michael Kimsal — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:02:05 -0000

This has been the same situation for nearly *any* phone for the past several years. 3 years ago I was looking at phones and the 'list price' of almost all were $299-$499, with 'rebates' of $100-$400 if you signed a 2 year agreement for at least $39/month. That's a minimum of $950+ for 2 years, when the actual *cost* of the phone (parts/labor/shipping) was likely under $50. Yes, R&D, etc. but this issues this article (rant?) brings up are hardly new.

And prepaid generally costs more per minute than the monthly contract rates, so you're sort of screwed either way.

Re: 2008/09/25/how-many-times-will-mobile-operators-repeat-the-same-mistake/

Michael Kimsal — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:05:17 -0000

Why should they change or care? They'll keep doing it because there's only a handful of limited choices for most end users. When you've only got one or two options in an area for service, you'll take what's given or do without. There's nothing "they" need to learn. "They" are probably wondering when "we" will "learn" that they're going to keep doing this regardless of what we say/do, because ultimately "we" keep going out and buying the shiny new toys regardless of what terms are attached to them. Certainly enough people keep buying regardless of terms to make it worthwhile.

Re: 2008/12/30/john-lennon-olpc-ad-poor-taste/

Michael Kimsal — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:28:40 -0000

The voice impression was horrible. No idea who did the voice work, but some
Beatle impersonators are better than this. Most people try too hard to
put some sort of heavy Scouse accent on when trying to impersonate the Beatles,
and inevitably they go way overboard.

Was sort of hoping they'd taken actual John audio conversation and mixed up the
various words in to whatever message they wanted to get across.

Re: DREAM JOB: $70K to use Twitter and Facebook

Michael Kimsal — Sun, 10 May 2009 14:29:49 -0000

I guess it's a bit of a sensationalist headline to get readers, but they're not looking for someone to twitter for $70k. They're looking for a "social media coordinator" and they spell out that this person needs to be in Portland and be a good communicator. While it sounds much better to say "tweet for $70k!" there's no doubt much much more to this. You're basically going to be the digital frontman (or woman) for the county. As more and more people start to use social media, you're going to have to be 'on' all the time. Certainly I'm not saying they're expecting you to be living online 24/7, but the pull is going to be there to be answering questions, doing research, and posting far more hours than one might do in a 'traditional' job. From that perspective, $60k ("$60-$70k") for probably being 'online' 60 hours per week (rough estimate between full time in office plus 'off hours' via phone/blackberry/whatever) isn't all that great. No doubt exciting and fun for some people, but as someone else already mentioned, many times getting paid to do something you 'love' as a hobby ends up being miserable.

I really hope they find someone who is a good communications professional first and foremost with an interest in social media tools, rather than someone who's an SM geek who manages to pass themselves off as a PR-type.

Good luck Multnomah County - we'll all be watching!

Re: Be Sexier in Person

Michael Kimsal — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:24:03 -0000

You could always watch this guy and do the opposite:

http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=OXNwnulkPVQ

Re: Grails vs. Rails: Are we seriously still talking about this?!

Michael Kimsal — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:56:37 -0000

Well, we're still talking about it because there's still choices to be made wrt time to learn and explore technologies. I still see PHP vs Rails discussions/arguments/whatever from time to time, or PHP vs .Net, etc. People do want some validation that whatever they've chosen is 'right' in the sense that the tech won't go away tomorrow and the hundreds of hours they've invested in a tech won't be seen as wasted. I actually didn't have as much of a problem early on, as when I 'chose' my web technology (PHP), there were only a handful of choices - PHP, Perl, ColdFusion and a couple other players. Only PHP and Perl were free, and Perl - well, you know the rest. :) Today there's a much broad range of web tech to choose from, and while it's not quite a zero-sum game, it sort of is. If your shop choose to standardize on Java, your .Net skills won't be of much use. Likewise, if your client has chosen and developed a Ruby/Rails system already, your Groovy expertise won't amount to much (yes, syntax is similar, and skills transfer somewhat, but the basic premise is still there).

Jason's point to me on Monday was that either choice - JRuby or Groovy - will bring huge productivity improvements to someone who's previously been writing Struts 1 code. The example is (obviously) correct, but the long term effects (both on that project and the skills of the people involved) of someone choosing one or the other is the unspoken motivation behind the 'debates' that continue to happen. IMO they will continue to happen for many years, because on an individual basis, choosing tech for a project is somewhat of a zero-sum proposition.